Thinking Sideways: Vitrified Forts

you can always. Don'tate your time, don'tate your money, but all those little creators need your help. So get down there now. It's goods working. Hey there, and welcome to the podcast. I am Steve, as always joined by and Joe and this week, as always on Thinking Sideways, We've got a mystery for you. It's a historical doozyies. Actually no, well okay, but you know the mystery isn't the dead bodies,

but you're strongly implied. Well there, I mean, if we're going to say that, then yes, there's dead bodies everywhere all the time around to creep Factor. Hey, high five

for totally steamrolling him. Already, good job. Okay, Okay, well let's go ahead, and now that you two are done with that, get into our story because this week we're gonna be talking about vitrified forts, which is a historical mystery, and the mystery is kind of twofold, because first off, we need to figure out how the sports were made, and then the mystery, of course is why were they made. So let's start first off, just so we give everybody the background of what the heck of vitrified ford is.

It's not a vitriolic for it. It's a vitrified for it, Yes, exactly. I don't know what either of those things are, so I was pretending vitriolic it is like an angry, hysterical fort say nasty things about you. Yeah, nobody likes that. That's one of those words that I am not realizing. I've read like a million times exact definition. No, I totally do, but I've just never I don't think I ever heard anybody ever say it. So for whatever reason, it was different in my brain and I understand. Yeah,

there we go. Yeah sweet. Anyway, Okay, for our story today, we're talking about vitrified forts. Yeah, vitrified forts or stone walls, which are built surrounding some kind of defensible position. So most of them are going to be found on the tops of high hills. That would be, you know, the great place to build your village, your castle, and then keep the enemy from being able to easily invade it as defend it. Also safe from floods, Yes, but it's

very true. Insurance salesmen love those places for that reason. Sometimes the walls themselves are short spans of distance. Sometimes they're long, sometimes they're pretty tall. Sometimes they're actually kind of short. Uh. And sometimes there are a series of walls that will circle one another. In other words, it's almost as if there's walls that are sandwich between walls, sandwich between walls. In castles there was an outer an inner wall. Yeah, no, it is. It's very traditional in

that regard. Uh And And sometimes because they were built on hills, they could have embankments or they could be surrounded by ramparts, you know, from the lower slopes of the hills. So these things are going to be in a whole bunch of different areas and have a lot of different configurations. But part of that variation in terms of the size of them is gonna be because of the time frame or their age, because vitrified forts, we

don't exactly know when they were made. It's leaved according to the current research that they were made somewhere between seven hundred b C and seven hundred so really just no time difference at all. And there's lots of them when we get into the numbers up, but there's there's

more than one, obviously enough. But there's lots of these things spread over a pretty big geographic area, and it seems like actually some of them could actually be older than that, So you know, I mean that could be you know, I don't know, a thousand, fifty hundred years before Christ, that kind of thing. Yeah, it's entirely possible. We're really not sure in this one. Yeah, it's really uh, you know, as far as what man was mankind was up to back in those days, we don't really know.

I mean, seriously, it's really Yeah. That's one of my favorite the big overarching on soft mysteries is like, what what did we do before TVO? Yeah, yeah, I mean it could be that ten thousand years ago when we had some you know in places like Europe or even in America and like North America we had like some sort of my kind of civilization, you know, and it's how they've been, you know, taken over by flooding from sea level rises because sea level has been going up.

It's you know, for eleven thousand years. I mean, yeah, we talked about some of that and who settled the New World first? About coastal village is being destroyed by rising sea levels? Absolutely so, I mean there's all kinds of cool stuff out there that's just been obliterated or else.

It's just underneath the whole lot of layers of sentiment and we get those weird things like GOLDBACKI Tempe that we talked about way way, way, way way back in the beginning, where it's like these things that are indicative of these like larger cultures and more sophistication than we give people from that time credit for. And I think, you know, that's why mysteries like this are always interesting to me because it's like, well, in technology, what's what's

great about a lot of these things? This technology as it each advance, and technology seems to spill a little more of the information out force You've seen all of this stuff now about how they're checking satellite footage and they're using the growth patterns of trees and then the terrain to be like, oh wait, no, you see that there's obviously the foundation of a building there, you just

can't tell it from being on ground level. Like, there's all these algorithms and tricks that they're using that they're finding so much so fast now because of that, So are never going to know the answer? Maybe will we know some of the answers? Probably, So we've just spent the last ten minutes talking about why this is a really cool mystery and haven't talked about the mystery at all. Okay, that's why it's intriguing now, the mysteries. Yeah, okay, So

here's the thing about vitrified forts. They whoever built these forts, and by forts there, they're a wall around a fort, is the easiest way to think about it. Whoever did this expose them to massive amounts of heat and in doing so melted the rocks that the wall was composed of, and this would fuse or weld the smaller and larger rocks together. So instead of having like a nice stacked stone wall, which is Joe's favorite kind of wall, they

would have one that was literally glued together. And keep in mind, as we've been talking about, this is two thousand plus years ago, and concrete and mortar were not at an available as far as far as we know now. Okay, so there, as far as we know, concrete and mortar was not around. Concrete and mortars seem to have been used by the Romans starting around I want to say, five or six hundred CE. But prior to that, oh gosh, I can't think of what the other civilization was, but

they were using bitjamin asphalt. The Egyptians, I think he is concrete. I think a lot of some of the blocks of the Great Pyramids were actually formed on the spot from one well, they know they used some kind Yeah, it was a gypsum base. They were burning materials at a gypsum and ash and creating mortar with that. And then the vice starts with them. I can't think of it. But Macedonians is that one? Were they before the Romans. We're gonna get an email somebody's going to correct us

because I can't remember. But the point is this was this was a technology that wouldn't have been available, so to not just stack your rocks there's some some value in that. So you're just saying it wasn't just like a giant magnifying glass they held up and just walked. Well, maybe maybe we might talk about something like that, but

for most things, we're pretty sure that they weren't doing that. Now, the catch with making a vitrified ford is depending on who the researcher is, it could strengthen the wall or it could weaken the wall. Some sources will say that the process of vitrification will weaken the wall because what it does is it melts some of the rocks into a glass like state, which can make them it all

and it can crack the larger stones. But on the opposite side of the argument, researchers saying, well, yeah, those bigger stones, so they're cracking, they're becoming more porous, and then the ones that melt into glass like state actually melt and go into those pores. So when it hardens back up, you've got a super super strong bond between these two two stones. So we're saying that the intentional

difference of stone reaction was intentional, Well, it was. It was most likely it was an accidental discovery, like a lot of things, but they're like, whoa, this is really really strong. And depending on which I'm sure you know, as with all things, people experiment, and depending on the mix of stones, some are going to inheat, going to vitrify in turn to that glass like state, and some are just going to crack some because they have higher

melting points. So if you combine them correctly, you can make a super strong wall. Yeah, the argument for that, yeah, absolutely, and actually not having a wallet. It's all solid and just rock solid like that that your enemies can't just run up and like you know, like fling a big catapult rock at and sort of knocked the top stones

off the bottom stones and stuff like that. Yeah, you know, absolutely, or people you know, there's there's stories of the guy who walked by every day and just pulled a stone down and nobody realized it was a giant, gaping hole in the wall because he did it just so slowly and cautiously, Like you can't do that. They're they're welded together.

So it's got a huge benefit. Um. And there are times where it appears that this was very much done intentionally or deliberately, because some of these walls are built on bedrock, that was would have a really really high melting point, so high in fact, that you couldn't vitrify the stones to it, that it wasn't going to create

that porous condition. So people would actually go get large stones, sometimes from great distances away, and use them as their foundations, so that the rocks above when the melting happened, would fuse to it. So the bottom of the wall was fused to something large and stable. So there does seem to be some very deliberate action that was taken for this. Yeah, and then they were smart enough to figure out that having a good solid foundation is key. Oh yeah, there's

the reason you don't build on sand. Uh yeah, not false apart, but well, the other's that vitrified forts. As we said, they've been around for thousands of years, but officially they weren't noted or discovered until the late seventeen hundreds, and at that time it was believed that they were pretty well contained to northern Scotland. Uh. Today we know that there's about sixty or seventy vitrified forts in Scotland.

There's a little over two hundred of them total having been found, and they're spread across northern and Western Europe. So some of the reading has been that probably what happened is the folks that knew how to do this would then begin to go and share the technology with their allies. Oh hey, let me help you out. You know, we've got this pact between each other. I'm gonna show

you how to do this thing I do. And then slowly the technology spread, though obviously it didn't go a long long time because there's only about two hundred sites that we found. I wonder some of it had to do with like marriage. Oh, I'm sure that that kind of that kind Yeah, I mean, yes, I am. It's

you know, that sort of that consolidation of power. But also because it's like a kind of a small number actually, and and kind of an intentional spreading, and either it's you know, certain people, we're just building their empire out, which is also possible because you know, again we don't have very great records from that time, or you know, it was I don't even know, somebody married somebody's wife and or somebody's brother and said, oh, hey, by the way,

we've been doing this is how we do it. You know where we're from, Let's build something like this. So I'm safe some rication. Man. Yeah, it's like a bachelor party. But the difficulty is is that we don't we don't know exactly which civilization was doing it. And there was all kinds of Germanic tribes in the area in the northern part of Britannia. I think it was called Britannia is what they referred to it at that time. But

there was the Pics and some other civilizations. But but nobody, because obviously there's no written record from that time frame that survived, we don't know, so so it's always hard to say, well, why did it spread like that? Was it through you know, through marriages, or was it through military alliances or conquests. A lot more interesting questions for me is why did it go out of style? Well, I think I have a pretty easy answer to that. Concrete.

That could be it high Yeah, but actually, um, it seemed to go out of style prior to the invention of concrete, and according to some of the theories out there, it had to do not so much with construction is destruction, yeah, and in which case I'm really curious about why I went out of style? Well, and that's a that's a great segue into theories, because, believe it or not, once again, I've done it. We've got a really short story and the rest of this episode is all theories. Well you

have two different theories sections. Yeah, well that's that's how I get away with it this time. You two told me last time. Don't do that again. Absolutely, it's too short, not really okay, So we have two sections of the theories. Section one is how was this done? In section two is why was it done? We're going to start with how and so, yeah, I'm more curious about why. I know, that's why. People I so I find the how obscenely interesting for some reason interesting. So let's let's get into

this now. We need to establish a couple of things. First, we've talked about the fact that it takes some really high heat to vitrify stone. To give you a frame of reference, the melting point of the stones that are used for this process at this time was somewhere between eleven hundred to fifundred degrees celsius, which is two to d degrees fahrenheit. What is that in kelvin? You're but but if you also need to keep in mind, is that's a lot of heat degenerate, and you've got to

keep it up for a sustained amount of time. It's not as if you can just get it to that temperature and that it's done. No, it's it has to have time to act upon the materials. So you've got to be able to maintain that heat for like what at least a couple of days, probably right at least hours at least you know, I'm not I don't want to give a number of hours, but a lot of hours longer that takes your beer bottle to meunt in

the campfire. Absolutely absolutely. You also need to remember, well, a lot of people will say, oh, well, humans at that time didn't have the technology. And if you think that, you're actually wrong, because this falls right in the Bronze and the Iron Ages, when man had learned how to melt or to make all those fancy tools for killing each yes, in a super contained environment, but the technology had been figured out that stone or it's out there.

So so it is something that is available. And I was doing some reading and at the time the forges of blacksmiths around this time frame, you know, somewhere between seven hundred seven hundred, it was not uncommon for them to be able to sustain fires of up to so they've got the ability again in a small in a contained space. I totally understand that, because that's the big

part of that, right. It's like, you can't get a fire like a wood fire, camp fire up to heats like that, really no, because it's got a feed off itself and be self containing atuff. Yeah, I get it. Is it the coke that has to get that? I imagine we have a better success using coal and stuff like yeah, yeah, I would think you would. Okay, sure we start into now that we're now we've given that

little baseline. Let's do theory one, which is this was done in the initial construction of the wall, and theory one subsection A. You're gonna love this episode, Devin. There's all kinds of subsections. Yeah, but you didn't use bullet points, so that's kind of bumming me out. Well, it's because it's too big of areas and it would have taken this four page thing into seven. Yeah that's my trick. Oh, is that why you do that? Okay, you notice a

really wide margins, really big friends. Okay, the first theory we're gonna discuss, discuss discuss is the kiln method, and the idea here is that, yeah, well, the idea here is that what the builders would do is they would take the larger stones that we're going to be the inner and the outer face of the wall, and they would lay them out and then they would place smaller stones in between them, and then they would take almost like gravel or really or even finer stone and pour

them on top of that. Again, and of course, you know you think about it, well, the big ones, then the gravel is gonna fall and it's gonna fill in all those voids. So it's pretty packed. It's relatively a densely filled space. It's kind of like packing peanuts. That's you know, it's what packing peanuts are for. They fill up all those air voids. Now, all the while that this is being done, wooden beams are going to be laid across the wall from one face to the next,

or logs. They don't necessarily have to be beams, but logs from the inner to the outer face. And wood is also going to be scattered amongst all of the stone debris. So we've got now a bunch of varying sizes of stone and a whole bunch of fuel that's all packed in there, and that's to vitrify the internal core between the two outer solid walls, right correct, because

not all of these walls are super thick. I mean some of them are only a couple of feet across sometimes, like you know, yeah, so it varies from wall to wall. So it's probably it would probably. I don't know if it would actually be easier to do a small one versus a large one, because it's easier to get more

fuel in the big one. But the point is there's there's tons of fuel, and in this idea of the kiln method, you would then take earth and pack it around a couple of the sides of the wall so that it would then retain what heat is going on. You put turf on top to cap the whole thing, and then you light the whole thing on fire. And from that point, because there is an earthen walls around it, the heat's going to be contained. It's gonna radiate within itself,

and it's good. You're gonna get the maximum usage out of that heat from the burning fuel rather than all it's like devons and a camp fire, all that heat

would just go whoosh straight up in the air. Instead, it's stuck in there, which is why you know your doors and windows seal so well in your house so you can retain the heat and get the only problem being it's just getting air tier to your fire to make it burn is super hot, and you would absolutely definitely have to have some kind of arrables because you've gotta have you gotta have air flowing through this thing in one way or another. But it's it's basically it's

it turns into a giant furnace. It's gonna melt everything inside. And this doesn't necessarily have to have been done when the wall was at its full height, and you could build several feet of wall and cap it and cook it and then dig it out, put the next layer of rock and fuel and do it again, and do it again, which would help prevent stability issues because if you're filling it with wood, then, of course is that would burns and turns the carbon and then our charcoal

and then dissipates. The material is going to want to settle in there, and there is obvious, uh, there's obvious signs of posts and beams being in these vitrified forts. They've actually found the impressions, so we know that they were sticking wood inside the wall to some degree at least. So I'm sorry, I'm having a really hard time picturing the way that you're describing this. Okay, here's here's an idea. I mean to use a really dumb analogy. Should what

I'm having a hard time picture? Yeah, go ahead, having a hard time picturing where in the wall the wood is. So you've got your wall like this is the wood going through horizontally from front to inner, from the outer to the interface, and then there would be wood inside of it, so running horizontally, they had them. They had them like like vertical as far as I not vertical, horizontal, longitudinally and then latitude. Yeah, there's there's wood laid all

in this thing. So so basically they made like a Lincoln log frame and then filled stones in. That's an easy way to think about it. I don't think of it as a Lincoln log as and they built a log cabin, but just a framework. Right. But she's she's got it right in terms of the way the wood would be laid in so that it would get you know, would all catch itself on fire, and then you get the maximum square footage of wood to or ratio, Like, yeah,

you're you're on. Then I don't need a weird, dumb analogy. Okay, other theories, and you're probably going to talk about this how the wood not being deliberately burned but being part of a stabilizing structure between the two outer walls, the inner and the outer wall, and being a stabilizing structure that kept that whole pile of rubble in between the sea walls all kind of I would imagine that would

be in the killed method. I would imagine that was what the earth piled on the outside was meant to do rather than wooden structure. The wooden structure would burn up. But I'm saying it's like, you know, it's not the word was not intended to be burned. Was intended as a framework to actually show up the castle walls, got it? Got it? Um? Yeah, I don't know. That's hard to say.

No again, you don't know. I mean, we don't know if this was intended to be a framework to make it all stronger, or it was intended to be burned to create heat. We don't know it. Yeah, which we did? Um sumachine, Yeah, I could just picture I'm gonna step out of my time my time machine, and I go, dude's what you're doing? Who immediately he come from? Why

did these guys never come back? Um? So really quick, let's circle back to something that we talked about as we were discussing this method, because will play into everything that we talked about later. I talked about the different sizes of stone that was going to be thrown into the wall for during the construction for the vitrification process. Now I had written this down wrong, and thankfully Joe caught it. But what it is is the small stones have helped me out with what's the proper way to

put this, Joe. It's to volume ratio, so they're gonna melt faster. Yeah, because a big stone is going to take a long time to heat all the way through, but a small stone is not. So it's it's more likely to vitrify. Yeah, because it's like that. You like your hands, for example, of a very highest surface to volume ratio, which is why you have to wear gloves in the wintertime. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, it's exactly right. Yeah, it's totally interrupt you to say the exact same thing.

You're saying, but the point is that those are the ones that are going to vitrify, and they're the ones that are gonna end up making fuse everything together to make that solid wall kind of makes them into a sort of mortar and mortar in themselves. Yeah, it is. It is a method of making mortar in a rudimentary fashion. It was intended by this process. Yeah, we don't know that. We don't know that where this theory is presuming that's what it's for. Uh, the second part of the how

it was done. Second theory is the open fire method, which I'm a little dubious on. But but we'll go ahead and run through this. Well, I mean, you may be dubious, but it does take a lot less like like this is way easier. We'll well, we'll talk about that in a second. I don't I don't agree with that,

but that's okay, because we still don't know. So some researchers have said, well, listen, it's obvious that they weren't using a killed method, and so what the builders were doing is they were piling wood on the outside of these walls and then maintaining that fire to get enough

heat to vitrify it. And the research says that in order for this to work, what they would have to have done is planned this out for a time when they knew the wind was going to be blowing in a certain direction, so it would act as a billows and it would push all of that heat into the wall and help keep maintaining it because it's it's pushing oxygen into that fire and it's gonna help burn it hot.

Obviously would be very helpful. Absolutely, although we are saying, I mean, this is Scotland, right, I mean, it's not like it's not like they don't ever get windy storms, right. My thing is, I'm a little unsure about this because I know I sent you guys the link to this, but there's more than one person who has tried to recreate a vitrified fort, and one of them was a guy by the name of Ian Ralston who did it back in to You Are Too Young, Devon, Joe, Do

you remember our c Clark's Mysterious World, the TV show? Vaguely? I didn't watch at the time. I mean I read all of his books when I was a kid, but I never not a lot of them. I don't think I ever saw the actual show, though I remember this show because it has the crystal skull in the intro and I always remember that. But Ralston, he's on an episode of that show and he builds a wall, and

he builds a really big wall. It. I'm guessing this dimensions are a guest here, but I think it was about eight foot high, about ten foot wide, and somewhere between fifteen and twenty ft long. And it was a free standing wall. He didn't have anything packed around the sides or anything like that, but still had wood running horizontally or from front to rear face. And then he stacked a bunch of wood on top and they lit

it on fire. The problem is is that it took a bunch of wood to get that thing up to heat and keep it up to eat, like six truckloads. Like I was laughing, and they had to call in a order from the local what did they dustman? And they were throwing it took him like all day. This is a problem with this thing is that you build this elien, all this wood against it, light it on fire, and most of the heat just goes straight up and

past your wall. Yeah, the campfire issue, you know, the only way to really do it is to build a packet so much would that eventually you get this big, huge pile of just coals like embers, uh, you know, up against your wall, and then you'll get some juice out of it. But yeah, yeah, And he poured wood on it for a day constantly, and in the end, like I said, it was about it looked like six I think they said six truckloads and so well. The sad part was watching them demolished the wall with the

back ho and he didn't vitrify hardly anything. He got some small stones to go to a semi glass like state and fuse, but that was much. Yeah. I didn't get a lot of action out of it. Yeah, you should have just left the ruin for somebody a thousand

years from now to worry about. Well, the hilarity was, of course, Arthur C. Clark is you know in in the episode the whole way through doing his dialogue, and he talks about the fact that for the vitrified Fords that we knew of, and I'm sure there's more been found since then, they weren't all found at that time. It would have taken at least half of the forests of Scotland in order to create enough heat to have

vitrified all of that that that stone. That's one of the one of the issues I have with this is the you know, the assumption that they used wood when I think they should have used coal. And and there's lots of coal in Scotland yea, and I you know, and it just seems to be coal was a lot would be a lot easier when you're thinking about the energy that's in a piece of coal versus a commention

a piece of wood. You know, if if you're gonna have your soldiers laboring day after day after day hauling logs up the hillside, versus hauling loads of coal, it sounds to me like you get a lot more bang for your buck having you were you went down the coal path, and I didn't even think too did you look up anything to see when the earliest mining of

coal in Scotland was? Uh, it's not recorded really. I mean it's like you know, I mean, you can find out about like modern more modern like several centuries ago or whatever, you know, and there's there's records about that, but beyond that, uh, there's nothing but I wonder about But it doesn't mean that they weren't using and digging it up. I mean, if the somebody dug up a massive coal pit back in the day and and then just their their civilization goes away, it gets overtaken by nature. Again,

nobody knows it's a coal pit. Well, I was just saying, I wonder about pete, because pete is a huge But I think I think the reason everybody focuses on the wood is because, like I said, there's you can see impressions and voids that they have identified as having had to have been from post. Yeah, but that doesn't necessarily do yeah, exactly, because I would think you would need

an exterior source as well. So you know, maybe it is that they, you know, put pete or coal, because obviously if they're if their work, if they have forged, is they're using coal of some kind, right, I mean, that's pretty I'm pretty sure that's the only way you can get things to go that high. But maybe not, um, you can go pretty high with I mean a house fires get up to say, I've had I've had woodstoves,

so half it's still not high enough. Yeah, So you know, I almost wonder if it was like a dual method sort of thing, because I mean, for example, it would have to be if you're using the logs just to stabilize your pile of rocks while you're burning it, and then vitrifying it, well, you can't exactly use chunks of coal to do that particular function, right, But then bonus it burns in like creates more internal heat. Yeah, I

don't know. Maybe. Well, And here's the thing is, so Ralston wasn't the only guy who's ever tried to vitrify a wall. There was, and you will see these referenced everywhere. But there was two experiments done, one in four and again in ninety seven. And the first experiment was very similar to Ralston's. They built the wall, they had wood

running through it, they had stone in the middle. Although these guys they cheated a little bit because they used fire clay brick for the outsides of the wall, which will stack better and it will be much It has a better insulative capacity because there's no gaps in the scenes. It's not giant holes from stack rock. They did it. It was really funny to get the bellows effect. They lit it at the beginning of a snowstorm and the wind was raging and the whole thing was burning hot.

But eventually their wall collapsed, so there was a there was a fault there. The next day when they checked it out, they did find that some of the material inside had vitrified, so they had achieved results, but not perfect results. Well it almost, I mean, it does again in Scotland, and it makes me think of like the kind of wind that blows through right before a rainstorm when we get them here. I mean, you know, granted rain isn't like great for a fire sustained, but if

it's a hot fire, the rain doesn't matter. So I almo, I mean, you know, it's not that hard to say, oh yep, it looks like there's a storm coming. Time to light that fire. And there's also nothing to say that they didn't have these things set up. It wasn't like they were just sitting around thinking okay, I guess maybe that you know that they would be like, okay, well you know we've got it to the stage and you know the wind is blowing. Better go light that thing.

I mean, you get it ready and when the when the weather conditions are right. Yeah, because it probably took a long time to set this, I mean an era of true manual labor. You want to get that stone from here to five miles away, you can start dragging it. It's gonna take you a while to get it there, or the oxen or the horses or whatever. But yeah, somebody's going to drag it exactly. Sorry, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's that's that's a valid point. And so. But the

so I talked about, there's also the seven experiment. It was actually a heck of a lot more successful. It was kind of a hybrid of the stack on the outside and the killed method. The same people or another group of people, well did this experiment There was they had caught into a vitrified wall to excavate it to check it out, and then they stacked a bunch of material back in that void and they tried the process there. So it's capped on the ends. They did manage to

vitrify a lot of the material. Their wall didn't collapse, but it did settle. But in the reading it talks about the fact that the way it's settled and how and even the top was sort of represents other vitrified walls, which again makes sense as things settle and melt and collapse. You're gonna get unevennus. I mean what does all that mean. It means that I don't know how they did this. It's these are the two prevailing methods, pete coal some

other fuel source. We we really just don't know. I really want you guys know that YouTube channel Primitive Technology. It's pretty good. Yeah. He it's just this guy that goes out into the wilderness and like basically is just working his way through primitive technology. I think he's at the Stone age. He's making He's got a furnace that he's made from clay um that he has like a

little wind thing and he's making stone. Uh No, it's a it's a little fan like a hand row with a fan on the bulk of it that's in the furnace that like, yeah, basically does a mellow thing. But I think he's out he's making stone things now, so he's at the stone period. But I really just want to tell him, like, hey, next, try to figure this thing out, because he is figuring, I mean, you know,

refiguring things out. It's perverse engineering. It's super cool. He just like made an entire mud hut in the middle of a forest. Who yeah, but that's the only thing modern he uses. It's crazy. Well, you guys, you guys should watch him sometimes. But I want him to figure this out because I'll check that out really interesting. I feel like he would be successful. They would be like he'd be like, oh yeah, obviously that's how they did it, and do it in like two minutes, and everybody should

be like because I mean, that's we talked about. There's so much fuel needed to make this process happen on this scale that nobody right. The math doesn't seem to add although I will say I feel like none of these experiments probably did justice to the amount of time and energy that was put into the originals. You know, so we say, well, the you know, the the experiments fell down, Well, did you spend a month making them? Probably not? Right. Did you spend a year and fifty

people making them? Probably not? But then again that that that makes it even more mysterious, because why the hell would they take all the time and trouble to do this well to be safer in their homes. Maybe we'll actually talk about Yeah, we're gonna talk about why probably Yeah, yeah, actually that is aren't we have gone through theory subsection A, and we are now about to get into theory subsection B, which is why. But first let's take a quick break

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and use this code sideways to subscribe. Again breakout dispatch dot com slash sideways and use the code sideways to get off your first delivery. So dispatch by Breakout games can't approved and we're back. Theory subsection B why why why over EMPHASI. Well, decoration is the first reason that people might have been doing this. Some researchers have theorized that the reason for the process going through the process

of vitrifying the stone walls was aesthetic. Is basically, if you are so rich and so powerful in this time of history that you can exert all of that manpower and money onto a wall too, then for just decorative reasons, melted. And remember things that are glassy inside of a stone wall like that, they look a little weird, and the colors can be pretty today, not all of them are,

you know, some of you can't even tell. But melted stone is a very unusual thing, and that could have been an expression of your wealth or your power to those around you, especially if you're a rich trader or a king or whatever. I don't know, I mean maybe, but that seems like it seems extravagant. But then I think about some of the castles that were built, or even things that some of the rich people do these days. Yeah,

just to prove how rich I am. If you look at stone work, for example, they want above and beyond what they really needed to do. Hey, we're talking above and beyond. Let's talk about like the Egyptians who marble coated and gold plated their their stone structures to their own death. Like what yea, So it's it's not outside the realm of possibility. Uh. The next sub theory here as to a reason. This is actually one that I came up with on my own, and I titled this stability.

If these walls are a couple of feet thick, if We live in Portland where for the last several years we've gotten a ton of rain in the wintertime and stack stone walls that have been in place for over a hundred years have started to blow out because of the water pressure. And they're just one layer two layers deep. Now imagine what would happen if all of those stones, like a concrete or mortared wall, were welded together. They

would be less likely to bulge out. You wouldn't have to build in dead man, which is a you know what the dead man is, Okay? It is something that penetrates into the embankment of the wall and is like a T structure that is tied to the wall. So in order from the wall, yeah, it's an anchor for the wall to push out that whole T structure that dead Man's got to come out. Well, you don't have to do that if the entire wall is unified in

its whole expanse. And Scotland is much like us here in terms of they get at least as much, if not more rain than we do, so this would be a great reason. Take embankments on the hill that your villager fort or castle is built on top of and vitrify them because the thing is not going to blow out from underneath you in giant rain storm or ice. You. Yeah, I probably wouldn't have nearly the kind of effect that

they would on just a simple stack wall. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you've got you know, water stuck in between every single one of those little rocks and it, you know, freezes and expands, and you know, it's going to be harder for it to destroy it. So I mean, again, this is this is what I was thinking of as

I was doing the reading. It's not any reading. It's what I think of two, which is like weird, but nobody else thinks that, which makes me think that there's that's like I always have this thing when we have some so obvious idea, right, we're missing something. Yeah, absolutely, obviously we're just the idiots. That's a way too easy. Well, I don't think stability was really the issue though, because I mean there's a lot of structures that were built back in those days that are still around and so

maybe stability was not that necessary. I think the stability ideas for more of the ones that were built as kind of ramparts or embankments, because there is there's one I can I don't know the name of it because there's so many of them and they are impronounceable for me, because I cannot do that like the Scottish Gaelic. Yeah, I can't do it. But it is a big hill top that is nothing but vitrified stone for what looks like to be fifty or a hundred feet of the

top of that that hill. It's yeah, it's pretty another way you're talking about, it's like about a hundred about two hundred yards. But it makes sense. Why if you were trying to keep that thing from washing out from underneath you, why I would think you would vitrify it, hold it in place a lot in the case of a lot of these, correctly if I'm wrong, but don't.

Isn't there generally a belief that there was an outer layer of larger cut stones that were stacked, you know, on the outside of that, and now that those have been removed to vitrify or not yet put in place to vitrify that stone. That does not sound familiar to me. Yeah, most everything I've read about is like, this is the wall, and this is what it is, and we're not gonna

we're not gonna then put a dress layer on. So yeah, So in that case, they were just using smaller rocks that weren't cut and shaped and everything to stack upon one or another. So that's not I guess that would be kind of necessary for your stability. Otherwise you're for it. It's just kind of like an oversized gravel pile. Exactly, exactly right. So let's go into the next layer of the theory of why this was done. And this this section of why is that it was done for intentionally

destroying the fort or the walls, and there's subsections to this. Uh, and it's going to make a little sense, but we're going to start with who would have done this in order to destroy the walls? And that is the original residence of said fort. It's like, I'm sick of this. Look, let's yeah, I have been asking you to redecorate for

years and you just won't do it. No. The theory says that the residents were leaving the place that they lived, and instead of leaving this nicely made for to vacation for the next group to come along and just occupy without exerting any effort. They went ahead and decided that what they needed to do was burn that mother to the ground. And so they pulled parts of the walls down through this fuel in there and then lit the whole thing on fire in an attempt to destroy it.

It's an awful lot of work to do to destroy a place you lived up because but it's also like two hundred of them over the Yeah, that's like a lot of a lot of them. But that the thing about it is is that it would be easier just to dismantle it than to card the wood or coal

or whatever up there. It would be. But the other thing about that that I that occurred to me is if you think about the times and everything, I mean, maybe they did it for say, superstitious reasons, like they've been living there and they decided for what whatever reason, the place was cursed or haunted and they decided it had to be to destroyed. It couldn't just be you know, we can't just move out, We've got to burn this

spirit or whatever. Or it could be that maybe there was some sort of a plague thing going on and they decided that disease that kind they said, decided to burn the thing to kill off disease. My I understand that. My my issue with it is that it took so much time and effort to get the fuel there that usually when when people were leaving the site that they had lived on, there was two reasons or meaning impending threat of war and I got to get my stuff

and get out of here or famine. I got no food, so I'm I'm weak and I need to go somewhere to where I can eat, neither of which I would think would encourage people to stick around and that and do all that work to light the walls and fire to destroy them. They mean, it's literally it's raising your home, and that's just so much work. In either of those scenarios, it's a good argument for building your house or your city out of wood. So it's a lot of you

just you know, torch it. When your enemies think the same thing, I know they like it to but and that's that's what why I like my my my ghost ghost Castle idea a little better, my ghost Forward idea a little bit better. Yeah, because yeah, even though that's lonely, it's silly, but you know, hey, you gotta curse. You gotta do what it takes to get rid of that curse. Okay, well, yeah, I like the B part of this theory better. Well, the B part of this theory is actually pretty robusting,

a lot of fun. This is where we're gonna have the fun tonight. Not not that we haven't been having any fun, I promise. Uh. Section B of intentional destruction was that the destroyers were the conquerors, the people who conquered that place. I mean, it makes more sense, it does, And actually that was very common back in the old days. It's happened all throughout the world. They took raising your enemies home. Yeah, I mean the torch entire I mean

entire walled town's, entire cities were completely destroyed. Not just torch, but I mean, you know, disassembled, sending the message. Because what you're doing, you're sending a message to everybody else. If you opposed me, this is your fate. So go ahead oppose me, and it's your fault. You knew what

was coming. I still think it was a little wasteful when I think about, like when you think about all around you know, all across here, like Alexandria, in places like that, all these places that were just completely destroyed by the invading army, all throughout ancient Greece and everywhere else. You know, they'd still be there and they'd be very cool archaeological size today, but damn it, some jerk decided

to be more fun to take them apart. Yeah. I was just thinking, I almost wonder if, because I know we're going to talk, actually, why don't you talk about the thing you're about to talk about and then I'll talk about the thing I'm going to talk about. Okay, So she's given me my marching order, so I'm just

going that. Er. So this part of the theory is, so this is theory be Subsection one is that it was all done by hand, all of the destruct Again, I'd see issues with soldiers who were very who have just spent all this time and energy conquering somewhere then turning around and having to scavenge the landscape for material

to burn. Yeah. So here's here's my thing is what I don't know what there is to say that these walls that the stones weren't actually the middle part, or actually I thought they could have been the middle part,

the filler between two larger walls that were stack stone. Yeah. Well, so the reason I'm saying this is it could have even earthen walls with wood in the middle, right, and that it wasn't that the armies were like, all right, was drag a bunch of wood up here to like set it on fire, but that they accidentally did the kill either of the first methods on how by just saying all right, like set the fire, set the fire on the wood, just towards the whole thing, and then

walked away from it. And for whatever reason, by coincidence, that the wind was blowing perfectly and there was just amount you know, that the conditions were just right for it to vitrify the stone walls instead of just you know, burning then the stone crumbles and whatever, you know what I mean, Like I almost wonder if it was just like that, because I again, like the two hundred spread over this distance, it's not as though it's like every fort in a given space, right, So I almost wonder

if if there's some sort of addition to the like joke keeps thinking right that like that, that maybe that wasn't the entire wall, that there was some more components to the wall, and that we just don't I mean, that's lost to history. It's possible, and and so the I mean it's because of the heat that it's taken. If this was done right, these fires could have literally

been burning for days. And in a time and era where you don't see lights at night, that is going to be very frightening to the villages and towns around you to see that that this town is torched and it is still on fire three days later. Or but at the same time to where you're talking about, like maybe it had earthen structure and then would there's a well. But I'm thinking is that there's a couple of them that it doesn't make sense because they're all different shapes

and sizes. There's like the one that popped in my mind. I think it's called uh Mark's Moat or the Moat of Mark. I can't remember which one it is, but the images I've seen, it's like a space the let's say the size of this this building that we're in, but it's all flat, it's all in the ground. There's no raised wall, so it's almost like the ground was vitrified. So I mean, that might lend credence to where you're

going with it, but I don't know. I mean, it's it's super confusing because because we don't know how it was done. That's what's so confusing about the thing about it is too, is that maybe you know, if they were under siege, for example, which would probably have happened before you know, your little fort falls and the then vitrified for you. Maybe you know, back in the old days of siege warfare, they didn't have siege machines or anything else or a huge army. They would just like

they would just wait them out. Yeah, they would do that, and it might have been well, that's that could be a long, tedious process sometimes depending on where the water supplies inside, how much food they got squirreled away. Maybe a more proactive way to do it is to go cut down the forest nearby, stack up all those trees and lumber all the way around the fort, and just light it and just light it and you could basically

asphixiate probably everybody inside the place. You probably you probably could, and your problem is done, and so you're just like, hey, that's it. And of course you sort of do a little bitrification at the same time, but the purpose is really just effect yea, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's I guess that's kind of my thoughts as well as that it's you know, there's nothing to say this was intentional, right though again we well we're actually gonna get into some

intentional reasons, so we we destruction. Well, yeah, in the in the destruction by the conquerors theory, there are some intentional ways that this possibly could have done. Let's let's actually those are the next bits that we have. This is my original theory. Yes, I know, so this one is saying that the conquerors did this, but much like Joe said, they did it as a way to burn their enemies out. And they did it using archimedes death ray,

which is really fun. And for those of you who have not heard of archimedes death ray, uh, it's an invention that he came up with. It's called his death ray or his heat ray. Archimedes lived about two hundred BC E but he's described in the Siege of Syracuse as having destroyed the ships of the Romans using a device which was basically a series of giant mirrors that focused the sunlight and would catch those ships on fire. Then they obviously they burn sinkster did, yes, they did?

How did it turn out? Not so good? It's actually one of my favorite screen caps of all time from MythBusters has just got Adams Savage standing in like kind of a bright light saying I'm standing right in the death Oh no, it's not even Adam, it's Jamie, one of them standing in the middle of a bright slightly bright spot and saying, as you can see, I'm standing

right in our death ray and I'm not dead. Yeah, but they I mean, yeah, it's certainly they had this technology in northern Scotland at the time, and the enemies were directing the beams of their death rays on the walls of the fort and melting them. It actually is a viable technology, but the array of mirrors you would have to have it. You've seen that. You've seen that solar collector in southern California, right, and one that's got

the big tower with the bulb. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean that day is what is that thing like a kilometer in diameter or something like that. I have no idea. Yeah, I mean, and it made a pretty huge array of mirrors first shire, So its great idea, but I think it's pretty funny. Okay, We'll go on to the next tool that the enemies were using. Uh, that is Greek fire, which if you don't know what Greek fire is, well nobody else knows. Yeah, so good. Any but Greek fire was most likely some form of

crude petroleum. I just want to point out the number of times you use the word crude in this. What's because it's crude. It's crude. I can't have to joke because it's crude oil. What would happen is, so the Romans used this, and they would they used it naval battles because it's scared the hell out of their enemies because it's petroleum. So it burns while it's on top

of the water. And what they would do, Yeah, so they sprayed at their enemies, or they would throw it in these kind of rudimentary grenades, yeah, like phases or whatnot, and it would hit and it would splatter everywhere, and then somehow they would you know, shoot it arrow at it that was on fire. You know, the the old movie trope of shoot the burning arrow. That's what they

would do. So the theory goes that the invaders had Greek fire and they were throwing it at the wall and that was the fuel that then created such intense heats that it vitrified the stones. I mean, I guess I actually would say that if this were true, it would I would put this more on me. We did it intentionally in the building process, because it would be a hell of a lot easier to create the heat with this kind of fuel source than it would be

packing all that would to the site. Yeah, except for you know, the people who were building the forts might not have had Greek fire slash petroleum. But if they had Greek fire, then it would be a hell of a lot easier. Agreed. But the isn't this theory that

the attackers had Greek fire. I feel like it would make more sense if it had been the builders had the Greek because if Greek fire, if the technology of Greek fire existed, then you would think that most everybody would know most everybody, I understand, the technology is not universally applied. Well, I guess not necessarily, because you you know, petroleum, you have to actually like mine, right, he's not mine.

Theres even in the ancient world in the Middle East where it was actually just right, but in the Middle East not in Scotland, right, So it was trade going on between the Middle East of scott But if we're saying, like the Romans of the prehistoric North Scotland to Arabia pipeline exactly, it's made out of bamboo. But yeah, it worked. Yea. I'm just saying that the Romans had a lot of

control in the Middle East in this time, right, Scotland didn't. Um. So if we're saying, you know, it is the Romans are coming to invade Scotland, they could have easily had access to something that they didn't have in Scotland, which is petroleum, which you know, I think this is actually one of the better theories somehow. Honestly, it's good to know. You know, it's a really crappy theory. Nukes, Yes, there is that. It was nuclear weapons. This is the greatest

thing freaking internets. Somebody on the internet once when hey, you know, nuclear blasts or hot enough to melt stone, wait, vitrified stones happened in the ancient world. The ancients had nuclear weapons. I really, I think that's all the further we need to take it, because that would be so I mean that that that family guy skit which we've

talked about before. I don't think this is it. No, it's part of the problem is is that you got we're talking like, I mean, the temperature is right at ground zero and a nuclear blast were like five million something ludicrous like that. So this would be way further out, and there would be all kinds of vitrified stuff in a circle, you know, along with you and a radius,

and creator would be a creator. I mean, the creator could have overgrown, but there would have to be other bitrified you find like maybe a cliff or a rock face and I've been subbly melted, you know, in the area you find all kinds of stuff like that. I mean, there would be. But don't you left out my favorite theory, which is, according to ancient astronaut theorists, um, ancient alien technology could have been employed here. It's such a thing

even possible. It is. What if they had a battle, wasn't invading Aliens and and they got like laser or something like that, Scotsman versus Aliens. It's such a thing even possible. Yes, why not? It is? Is it irrefutable? No? Is it possible? Yes? Actually it is. I think it is irrefutable because can you come up with like a good way to refute that? Drunk? Yes, are you drunk? That's problem? All right, you guys got any other theories you want to run through this one? Just a quick question.

I'm not I'm not really sure how much archaeology they've done around these things. I mean, do they keep calling them vitrified forts? Do they? Does anybody actually know if they're truly fortu or not. Well, some of the a number of them, it is obvious that there was a settlement inside of them, Like the one I was talking about that looks like it's on the giant embankments. There's one where it is um, oh gosh, what is the it's two columns with an arch that. Yeah, So like

that's very intentionally done and somebody lived in that. The reason the reason I'm asking is, you know, maybe they were not built before its Maybe they were built to be ceremonial site and maybe lighting a giant bonfire to the gods once a year or once and a once in a lifetime or whatever. That's how they broke it in. It's like we gotta seremon this mornial site. Now we've gotta like, you know, pile of this wood or coal or whatever and have this huge fire and because I

mean they're actually on fires, yeah, or even like funeral fires. Yeah, it could have been that two sacrifices. But I mean there's places like if you look at Sexy Woman in in Peru, which looks if you look at it, it looks like we're just a huge, freaking three tiered fortress. And I said, I said, I've got pictures of it. I'm sure you guys have seen pictures of it. It's amazingly impressive. And but it's not a fortress at all. It was not built to be a fortress. It was

actually built just as a ceremonial site. And so you know, it's entirely possible these things were built as ceremonial sites and there was no invader, conquer or whatever. They just had a religious ceremony on their hands. Yeah, they had too much time on their hands. Well you know, I mean people did make the time to do stuff. I mean again back to back to Peru and sex type woman. I mean, obviously that took a massive amount of effort

to build that thing, and those people did it. And uh, and so it could have been just you know, once a year or once in a lifetime whatever, we had this massive fire and for to a piece of gods or something. Yeah, I mean I can't see that. That's not right, you know, I mean, it's it's entirely possible because again, as I've said a jillion times, you have no nobody had. We can all speculate or another possibility I'm sewing this up for our archaeology like anthropology, major listeners.

Another possibility is supposing they were ceremonial sites and the fires were not not part of the ceremony, but there was like you know, it's happened sometimes in human history, there was kind of a change of religion and suddenly the old stealing it. You almost need to be like

kind of scoured and done away with. And so you know, maybe that's the reason that they were all all flamed, because otherwise, when you think about it, if you're the invader, and it makes it's less work to just dismantle it and sow the stones down the hillside, then the card in all that number, it's less work if you're the invader. And and also, by the way, some of those stones might even be useful. You know, you build your own stuff out, but yeah, you can call them a way

to build your new castle. Yeah you could do that too. But yeah, so so to me, it makes utterly no sense in terms of destroying just somebody's city to to try to burn it like that. It just doesn't. So so yeah, if it makes no sense, but let's bring in some religion to see if that explains it, or superstition or something like that. Yeah, yeah, maybe maybe that would be because that's not practical. I'm not putting down religion, but when you're talking about like, you know, you're an

invading army, you want to do what's practical. Oh yeah, you've practical. You've already killed everybody. Now how do we just mantle this the most efficient way possible? Well, I think that's a good a good point to to break this off always the best I don't want to. Yeah, I'm sorry if anybody's offended by that. And we know everybody understands that. Yeah, you're not bashing Joe. Oh yeah, but I don't know, but I think anything else thought

that that. Nope, that's about it. Yeah, aliens religion, and we really cover the Gama. Yeah, we really pretty hard. All right, Well this is a good classic. Okay, okay, Well let's give you all of the important details about the podcast. We've got a website Thinking Sideways Podcast dot Calm, where you can find all of our episodes and on there you're going to find some of our research links.

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send us an email. So if you've got questions, you've got concerns, you want to give us a backhanded compliment, you can do all of that through our email, which is Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com. And with that having been said and all those bases covered, I think it's time to rock on. You've been saving that one the entire episode, haven't you. Yep. He spends the entire the entire week just thinking three weeks. I'm pretty

sure it's a hard job. Oh my god. All right, well I'm I'm all burned out, so uh yeah, I'm gonna flaming out here. Okay, solid by O